Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

I head south down Fifth and then west on Fifty-ninth, skirting the edge of the park. Little pools of streetlights follow the dark paths into the park. A horse and carriage clomps by, jangling its belled harness. I smell manure, leather, and perfume. Does the horse care about this performance? It has a job to do. It gets treats. Or is it whipped? Balanchine escaped the Russian Revolution, way before Stalinism set in. If he had stayed, he might have been killed. Instead, he came to America. He started a school. I was born in America. I went to his school. The accidents of history are everywhere. The carnage all around us.

I pause in front of the Plaza, its big, subdued bluster lighting up the night, a quaint idea of itself for tourists, and also, still itself. I remember Dad and Judy going off to the Plaza one anniversary weekend. Sam and I avoided each other as much as possible, but one night we met in the dark kitchen and neither of us turned on the light, but instead we just stood in front of the refrigerator and ate straight from it without forks.

I have never truly, entirely, felt what was done to me was “rape.” “Rape” suggests a finite act. What was done to me kept happening, went on and on. It is still happening to me. That one time produced a child that I was too young to carry. That time has never been over for me. The therapist I saw in my twenties wanted me to say “rape” because she was sure that my problem was I couldn’t admit what had happened to me. But I didn’t want to admit it. Because the word took away something too precious.

After I stopped seeing the therapist, I studied harder and danced more. The incessant movement, and the academic work, did its job. They kept the pain muted but still present. That was optimal. A reminder of a part of me.

A version of the past I could live with.

I arrive at the Columbus Circle mall, which gleams upward in mirrored glass. When I lived in New York, all this would have been unthinkably tacky, but now it feels right. At the head of the circle, in front of one of Trump’s hotels, is a giant metal statue of the earth spinning on its axis.

I am crying, the kind of tears no one can see, that can be dismissed as watery eyes or an allergy.

How does a city go on and on, remaking itself, losing itself?

This city is a mirage, a dream. A world spilling out, too small for itself. My past is always alive, is always being made. I bend again and again to that humidor, that glass tube of light, and I smash it to the ground. In the moment when the glass shatters but before it hits the ground, I have broken what I am. I am in the state of becoming something else.

I know where I will go tomorrow. The house that started it all.

Mira’s body finally begins to change. Her breasts begin to show and her hips round slightly. It has taken her body a long time, but now it rushes to catch up.

She’s hungry all the time. Her stomach lurches under her ribs. She eats some apple, some chips, some pie. She eats and eats. Something secret is growing inside of her. It is like a wild, unruly garden. It is something hungry and thirsty.

She sits bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night, covered with sweat. Her body is limp, foggy, wet, wrung-out; in contrast, her mind is buzzing and razor sharp. She feels bad, really bad, a different kind of badness she does not even have the words for. It’s the opposite of how she feels when she is dancing.

A month and a half after Mira’s birthday, one of the women of the pulled-back hair and buttoned blouses and gold pins — the one who met with her after the SAB audition — appears in front of Mira in the hallway. Her eyebrows are drawn together. Her face is strange and unseeing. “Mira,” she says. “Please come here.” Mira steps into the woman’s office. On her desk are the ledgers, the big books she sees her walking around with and consulting. A heavy green sky out her window makes Mira blink.

Mira grips her bag tightly against her hip. She has never been called into an office before — is this being talked to ? Usually, in a room full of girls all moving, she rises, bigger and stronger, out from under the blanket of tondues and pliés. She knows how to rise to be noticed within a line of girls, to stand straighter and command her legs to beat faster, to obey more quickly than the others. But, standing alone, in this blank office and faced with the woman’s face, some other face she does not know — not kind, not mean, and not anchored by any movement — she feels herself disappearing.

“Mira,” the woman says, taking a sip of her coffee. Mira keeps her eyes on a far roof through the window. “Your body—”

The woman says something in Russian as she puts down her coffee, then picks it up again. “No one say you are fat. No girl here is fat. For ballet dancer, is not question of fat. ” Her face smoothes out. “I remember one season at the Kiev, I eat only chicken and turnip. We are not allowed bread.” She smiles.

“Some is made to be ballerina. You can do, do, do! Like ballerina. But some girls is not. We must find out this. Is better to know than not know. If not ballerina, something else.”

Mira is so invisible now that she cannot move. She has turned into vapor at the same moment she is being told she has too much substance. “No!” she says suddenly. Then corrects herself. “I mean, okay. Okay.”

The woman laughs. Mira has never heard this woman, whom she has seen in the hallways and classrooms so often, laugh before. It is a low, then high, unpredictable sound, like an animal skittering from corner to corner. “Mr. Balanchine likes you — you are a former Marie. But many girls change and we cannot do anything. Material is good but it — collapses.” She is talking about Mira’s body as if it were separate from Mira, a disappointment that has befallen them both. Her brows draw together — yes, sympathetic. “Dear, sometimes there is change. What can we do? No where to put girls then.”

Mira’s head pounds. Tears spring to her eyes. Sympathy, immeasurably worse that cruelty. Mira feels the ground unsteady beneath her.

In the moment before she turns, Mira notices, hanging on the wall a studio shot of a woman. It is a black-and-white publicity photo with that timeless look that means it could be from twenty or a hundred years ago. She is a smooth-cheeked young woman, in a black leotard on her pointes. Her expression is soft, her features delicate, well-spaced, exquisite. She has a serenity and generosity to her expression that Mira has never seen on her teacher Tumkovsky. But, yes, here at the bottom of the photo in embossed letters is her teacher’s name: Antonia Tumkovsky.

In the distance, Mira hears clapping somewhere and the splat of water from the fountain outside.

Mira walks blindly down the hallway. Her shoes squeak. She locks the door on a bathroom stall. She sits on the toilet with her bag on her lap. Her breath comes jaggedly. There are shuffles and clangs from outside the stall. A strong odor of rubbing alcohol. More girls are starting to arrive. Of course everyone will know. There is a line between the girls who have been talked to and the girls who have not, as visible as a road divider. On one side the traffic flows freely; on the other side, it crawls along, snarled.

Breathing more regularly, she exits the bathroom and nods to the other girls, a few of whom are in her class. She opens her locker and begins to search for her morning classes’ leotard. She doesn’t dare investigate her body for its betrayal. For now, she treats it gingerly, like something broken that might have sharp edges she could cut herself on. Terrifying: she does not know how to fix it.